I have watched the relentless Russian assault on the city of Mariupol and its more than 400,000 residents with horror. I was in Sarajevo in 1996, after the terrible Bosnian war, and I saw what a city looks like when it has been devastated by mortars and rockets and artillery fire. I will never forget that sight as we drove into Sarajevo to begin our work observing the election. It is etched in my mind forever.

I have not been posting here as often as normal because I have been spending a lot of time online, trying to keep track of what is happening in Ukraine. I observed a number of elections there, in Zaporizhia, Cherkasy, Odesa and Crimea. Like so many others, I am shocked and appalled by how the echoes of World War Two have appeared in front of our eyes. Because it is to that war, mostly, that people refer in their online postings, although there have been other devastating, but smaller, wars since.